Diana (15 page)

Emotions, unlike papers, refuse to be catalogued in order or disorder. They challenge us to find their form—only to disappear like the perfume of certain flowers that seems to be the most fixed, the most real thing in the world and yet has no more form than the rose or iris from which it emanates. We know, of course, that the form of the rose is not its scent, but in effect, its scent is a phantom similar to emotions, which are the realest but least apprehensible things in the world. I punished myself mentally for my mistakes in dealing with a woman like Diana Soren, allowing myself to slide on the little sled of my domestic loves. I convinced myself that she was giving me passion and tenderness, and I was too lucky not to realize the privilege it was to love her, even if that meant giving in, if necessary, to her whims and imaginings.

Another night, she woke up agitated. She told me she'd imagined herself entering a salon she expected to find full of people. From far off, she could hear the conversations, the laughter, the music, even the tinkle of glasses. But when she walked in, no one was there. She heard only the rustle of a long skirt, as of taffeta. She began to shout so she'd be heard outside. She woke; I thought about the Posada I'd given her.

XXII

Diana's whims and nocturnal frights lulled me into inattention. If I heard her stirring at night, I ignored it. If she got out of bed, still half asleep I would imagine her opening curtains and closing doors. When she appeared in my dreams, she was wearing black, standing opposite a balcony while another woman, identically dressed, shot her.

But there was no music in this catalog of grotesque images. Everything occurred during long silences punctuated by the shots. One night Diana's voice, far off and odd, was chanting something in a voice that wasn't her own, as if another, far-off, maybe even dead voice had come back to possess hers, taking advantage of the night to recover a presence lost in oblivion, death, the usury of time.

The sensation was so strange, so alarming that I focused all my attention on it, clearing the cobwebs from my head to hear and see her clearly. That night the full moon was indeed pouring in through the open window like a huge white embrace: Diana was sitting next to it wearing her white baby-dolls, whispering a song I soon identified. It was one of Tina Turner's early hits, a song called “Remake Me” or “Make Me Over.”

Diana had something in her hands; she was singing to an object. Of course—the telephone, I admitted with pain and instant jealousy, banishing the image of a woman perturbed by the full moon, a forlorn she-wolf howling to the goddess of the night: Artemis, her nemesis; Diana, her namesake.

If the flash of pain told me first that she was insane, the stab of jealousy quickly put me on notice: she was singing to someone … Should I break up this melodrama with a scene of my own, a jealous, furious scene? Caution overcame honor, and curiosity prevailed over both. Neither Hamlet nor Othello, that night I was just Prometheus's brother Epimetheus, interested more in knowing what was happening than in stopping or ignoring it. If I didn't proceed carefully, I'd never know what was going on … I opened Pandora's box.

I pretended to be asleep. I stopped listening to her. After a while, I felt her warm body next to mine, but it was strangely distant and she didn't feel around with her feet for mine that night, as she did on others …

How long could I control my desire to know to whom Diana was talking at three in the morning, to whom she was singing Tina Turner songs over the telephone? Because, beginning that night, she talked every night, sitting in a pool of light shed by the waning moon, in a distant and at first incomprehensible voice (another voice, imitated or possessive; Diana, owner of a mimic's voice, or the mimic's voice possessing Diana, I don't know which) that became louder as the moon died, more audible, passing from the lyrics of “Remake Me” to sentences not sung but spoken in that same deep, velvety voice, which wasn't Diana's. Her normal voice came from above, from her clear eyes, or maybe even from her lovely soft white breasts; this nocturnal voice came from her guts, her ovaries, maybe even from her solar plexus. She was saying things I couldn't understand without knowing the question or answer to which they were directed on the other end of the line, wherever that might be …

I remembered the Capitano toothpaste sent from Italy and imagined long-distance communication with who knows what place on the globe. Impossible to guess; all I heard, with ever-increasing unease, was Diana's different voice and the inexplicable words “Who takes care of me?”

I knew it sure wasn't me. She wasn't asking me to take care of her. But she was asking someone else, maybe more than one someone else. A lover, her parents, her husband, with whom she maintained a close and affectionate relationship (three in the morning in Mexico, midday in Paris)? But I knew that the woman talking wasn't Diana. She said it clearly. One night she was saying, I'm Tina; another, I'm Aretha; another I'm Billie … I understood the allusions, in retrospect. Billie Holiday was the Our Lady of Sorrows of jazz singers, our voice of every grief, the voice which we dare not listen to in ourselves but which she takes on in our name, like a black, feminine Christ, a crucified Christ to bear all our sins:

Got the moon above me

But no one to love me

Lover man, where can you be?

Aretha Franklin was the joyful voice of the soul, the grand, collective ceremony of redemption, a renewed, purifying baptism that peels off our used-up, worn-out names and gives us new ones, clean and shining.

A woman's only human, you've got to understand.

And Tina Turner was the woman abused, wounded, victimized by society, prejudice, machismo; the young woman who, no matter what, felt in her subjugation the promise of a free, clear maturity that would fill the world with joy because she'd known great sorrows.

You might as well face it:

You're addicted to love.

Between the songs, I listened to phrases that had no meaning for me—they weren't part of a well-known song, recorded and repeated by everyone—garbled chunks of a dialogue that for me was Diana's monologue in the moonlight.

“How? I'm white.”

What was being said to her? What was she answering, what was being asked? What did Diana mean when she said into the phone, “Make me see myself as another woman”? These questions began to torture me because of their intrinsic mystery, because of the distance the mystery created between my lover and me, because my obsession with knowing what was going on, whom Diana was speaking with, interrupted my mornings, kept me from working, plunged me into a literary depression. Reluctantly I revised my pages and found them lifeless, mechanical, devoid of the passion and enigma of my possible daily life: Diana was my enigma, but I myself was becoming an enigma to myself. Both of us were only possibilities.

I would wait impatiently for night and the mystery.

I didn't dare, from the bed, interrupt Diana's secret dialogue. It would only cause a scene, perhaps a complete break. Once again, I confessed to myself that I was a coward when faced with the idea of losing my adored lover. I'd gain nothing by getting out of bed, going over to her, grabbing the telephone from her hand, and demanding, like some husband in a melodrama, Who are you talking to, who are you cheating on me with?

I humiliated myself by searching through Diana's things to see if I could find a name written down by chance, a telephone number, a letter, any clue about her mysterious nocturnal interlocutor. I felt dirty, small, despicable, opening drawers, handbags, suitcases, zippers, slipping my fingers like dark worms through panties, stockings, brassieres, all the indescribable lingerie that once had dazzled me and that now I was handling as if it were old rags, Kleenex to be thrown out, soiled Kotex …

She had to give me the chance I needed. One night, she did. She invited me, I'm sure of it, to share her mystery.

XXIII

The old actor was depressed that night, conjuring up memories and longing, paradoxically, for a past time that had abandoned him. He felt betrayed by his time. He also felt he'd betrayed something—the promise, the optimism of the New Deal years. In his evocation of names, literary works, and organizations of the 1930s, there was both nostalgia and disdain, yes, a disdainful nostalgia. He said to himself and to us; There were so many promises that were not carried out. To himself and to us he said, We didn't deserve to see them carried out.

That night he would have wanted to channel that feeling into one of the parlor games with which we blocked out the tedium of Santiago. Since he got no answer from Diana or me (both of us tightly sealed—she certainly knew I was, and I knew she was—in the enigma of those nocturnal telephone calls, always furtive, never mentioned by light of day), Lew Cooper launched into an unsolicited explanation of why he had named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was precise and forcefully persuasive.

“No one deserved respect. Neither the members of the committee nor the members of the Communist Party. Both seemed despicable to me. Both trafficked in lies. Why should I sacrifice myself for either side? To save my honor? By dying of hunger? I wasn't a cynic—don't even think that. I simply behaved the way all of them behaved, the fascists on the right who interrogated me or the fascists on the left who never lifted a finger for me. I was selective, that's true. I never gave them the name of anyone who was weak, anyone who could be hurt. I was selective. I only gave the names of those who would have treated me in Moscow exactly the way these people were treating me in Washington. They deserved one another. Why should I be the sacrificial lamb in their mutual dirty tricks?”

“Can you measure the damage you might have done to those you didn't want to hurt?” I asked.

“I didn't mention them. Other people did. Lives were destroyed, but I didn't destroy them. The only thing I did was not destroy myself. I admit it.”

“The bad thing about the United States is that if you're denounced as anti-patriotic everyone believes it. In the U.S.S.R., on the other hand, no one would believe it. Vyshinsky had no credibility; McCarthy did.”

I said that, but Diana quickly added, “My husband always says that the dilemma of liberals in America is that they have an enormous sense of injustice but no sense of justice. They denounce, but they do nothing.”

“I read that,” I said. “He goes on to say that they refuse to face the consequences of their acts.”

Was that the moment to ask her, calmly, if the person she'd been speaking to at night was her husband? What if it wasn't? Would I be opening a can of worms? Once again, I remained silent. The old actor was going on about the extraordinary excitement of the stage experiments of the Group Theatre in New York, the communion between the audience and the actors during the 1930s, the time and the scene of my own youth …

The barrier between stage and audience disappeared. The people in the audience were also actors and were totally enraptured by those extraordinary performances, never realizing the terrible illusion they were sharing with the actors on stage. The tragedies represented by the actors would sadly and painfully become the tragedies lived by the audience. And the actors, part of society, after all, wouldn't escape the destiny they first acted out. Frances Farmer, blond as a wheat field, ended up tainted by alcohol, prostitution, madness, and fire. John Garfield, master of all the urban rage there ever was, died making love.

“Don't you envy him?” Diana interrupted.

“J. Edward Bromberg, Clifford Odets, Gale Sondergaard—all persecuted, mutilated, burned by witch-hunters…”

“Odets was married to a woman of sublime beauty, Luise Rainer,” I recalled. “A Viennese advertised as the Eleonora Duse of our time. Why Duse? Why not just herself—Luise Rainer, the incomparable, fragile, fainting, passionate Luise Rainer, wounded by the world because she wanted to be…?”

“Someone else,”
said Diana. “Don't you get it? She wanted to be someone else—Duse, Bernhardt, anyone but herself…”

“You're speaking for yourself,” I dared to blurt out.

“For every actress,” said Diana, vehement and exasperated.

“Naturally, every actress wants to be someone else, otherwise she wouldn't be an actress,” said Lew avuncularly.

“No,” said Diana, her eyes wide with fright, “more than that. To refuse to take on the parts they assign you, to take on instead characters you've only heard talked about…”

Right then and there I repeated her words, personalizing them, rooting them in her, taking away the disguise of the infinitive (“to be or not to be”) and that impersonal “you” Americans use.
You
refuse to take on the parts they give
you. You
interpret characters that
you've
only heard talked about …

I said all that to avoid saying what I really wanted to: Whom were you talking to on the telephone at three in the morning? My rage simply took twisted paths. The actor felt the tension between us rising above his own, so he went on with his evocation.

“I heard Luise Rainer say something very beautiful to Clifford Odets. She said she was born prematurely, so she was always searching for the two months she missed. Then she said, I found them with you. But he was a left-wing radical and rewrote her words: The general strike gave me the two months I was missing. Not love but the strike. The truth is, we're all looking for the months we're missing. Two. Or nine. It's all the same. We want more. We want to be someone else. Diana's right … Odets sacrificed his wife to coin a political slogan.”

“Diana wants to disguise herself and to disguise us.” I laughed sarcastically, offensively. “She invited you to live here to disguise our little affair. Even if it's a fact and everyone knows it, she must disguise it, you see, so as to act, to be someone else, to be a good actress in life because she can't be a good one on screen … I hate whores who want to be seen as bourgeois housewives.”